Over the past decade, camera technology has increased significantly, with much focus being placed on digital cameras. However, despite this technological development, certain drawbacks of cameras have yet to be solved.
Generally, all cameras with built-in flash units have one feature in common: they have a relatively small flash unit located generally in the front of the camera. Conventionally, when the shutter is activated to take a picture, the flash unit sends out a direct light flash when an in-camera sensor determines that a scene has insufficient light to make a correctly exposed picture. The user can often manually turn this flash unit on and off.
A persistent problem with conventional built-in flash units is its location and size. For at least the following reasons, the flash generally produces a poor quality picture under many circumstances. First, the light from the camera's flash unit comes from just above the lens. When the photographer holds the camera at eye level, the flash emits light from a place just in front of the photographer's forehead, which is not a normal light emanating location. Thus, the flash unit produces an unnaturally lighted photograph.
Second, the light source for the built-in flash is small in size, usually less than two square centimeters. In the natural world, light sources are generally much larger, such as light from the sky, a window, lights on the ceiling of a room, or light from a table lamp. The small size of the flash inadequately covers the entire view of wide-angle lenses. The flash is often partially blocked by a large lens, leaving an unwanted shadow of the lens in a picture's foreground. Thus, built-in flash units generally inadequately light the desired subject matter of the photograph.
Third, the proximity of the built-in flash to the lens often produces a red-eye effect, which is well-known to many amateur and professional photographers, when a human or animal subject is looking directly at the camera. This proximity to the lens also produces pictures with unwanted reflections off of shiny surfaces.
Finally, because of the small size of the face of the strobe, the camera's built-in flash produces harsh shadows behind the subject. The flash also unevenly illuminates subjects that are not at the same distance from the camera; with subjects in the foreground generally receiving too much light and those in the background not getting enough illumination.
Many of the problems described above are not limited to cameras with built-in flash units. Rather, they apply equally to cameras having mountable or attachable flash units.
Thus, there is a need in the art for devices and methods for avoiding the problems commonly associated with camera flashes and producing photographs having natural illumination.